Try creating a Bitcoin exchange that only works with on-chain txs. See how many customers you'll have when they find out they have to pay dozens of bucks per trade during congested mempool. This is why exchanges do the trades off-chain. On-chain, things would fail from the start.

I'm still waiting for a proper example of an exchange having more liquidity than the existing supply of a coin..

Let's be serious.. at this point, any internet connection disruption would cause HUGE trouble for the entire planet. Almost everything depends nowadays on an internet connection.

Banks want to go digital anyway. I don't think a plan to move their reserves into BTC rather than gold would be a far stretch. In fact, it'd be easier for them to store & move money this way.

Oh yeah, imagine banks suddenly switching from having to store tonnes of gold in extremely safe deposit boxes to having everything on a little cold storage device that could be not only moved in an instant but also replicated from bank to bank, recovering any of the funds in case of any kind of emergency.

No more trucks and planes filled up with tonnes of gold. All within a single click. It's all a matter of time before it happens.

Pentru un incepator, cred ca ATM-urile sunt cea mai buna solutie pentru achizitionarea de criptomonede. Poti vedea o lista de ATM-uri disponibile in Romania aici. Ai doar grija la limitele de anonimitate (ATM-urile Bitcoin Romania nu cer niciun fel de informatie personala pana in 5000 RON/tranzactie in timp ce ATM-urile Shitcoins.club cer de la €10.000 in sus sa scanezi buletin) si grija si la cursul de vanzare/cumparare - sa il compari mereu cu cel de pe CoinMarketCap.

Dar inainte de a ajunge la cumparare, sa vorbim despre modul in care iti vei tine banii in siguranta. Sugerez un Hardware Wallet (Ledger sau Trezor) daca intentionezi sa pui mai mult de $100 in criptomonede. Altfel, sugerez Electrum pentru BTC.. iar pentru altcoins, orice wallet care este open-source si decentralizat! Din punctul meu de vedere, mai bine dai $60 pe un device care sa te scape de griji decat sa te zgarcesti si sa ajungi sa iti pierzi banii prin diverse metode tipice celor noi in aceasta industrie.

Mare grija unde iti tii seed-ul. Nu fa poza la seed, nu il scrie intr-un notepad pe laptop si nu il pune in vitrina. Tinee-l acolo unde ai tine documentele tale cele mai pretioase sau bijuterii.

Ca platforma de tranzactionare, as recomanda Binance. Exista o procedura numita KYC de care lumea fuge cand vine vorba de exchange-uri (KYC practic iti invadeaza spatiul personal cerandu-ti informatii foarte personale in schimbul libertatii de a detine o cryptomoneda), iar Binance nu prea am auzit sa ceara fortat asa ceva. Beneficiul lor de a avea business-ul off-shore..

Daca nu vrei sa faci trading foarte des, recomand sa te interesezi de Bisq in timp. Este un exchange decentralizat care nu iti poate cere niciodata informatii personale pentru a tranzactiona. Pana atunci, daca te intereseaza sa lucrezi cu token-uri de pe blockchain-ul Ethereum, recomand Uniswap.

Cum tranzactionezi? Cel mai simplu mod de a tranzactiona e sa cumperi si sa astepti, a.k.a. buy & hodl. Din experienta personala, de obicei se fac mai multi bani asa decat prin daytrading pentru ca riscurile sunt per general mai mici. Poti face si daytrading, dar o sa ai nevoie de noroc..

Do you have a clear example (link?) of an exchange currently selling more coins than the available supply of a coin?

I'd rather believe that some exchanges fake volumes (and they do) instead. I think your fear is way more possible with companies like PayPal selling coins they never let you withdraw.

Here's how exchange orders look:
-> BTC/USD pair is listed on Exchangeus. You are the first to sign up there and deposit your 1 BTC. You place a sell order: 1 BTC for $2k. Alice comes up and wants to purchase BTC but your order is the only one that exists on Exchangeus. Alice deposits $2k through her bank account and places a buy order, filling up your sell order entirely.
-> Bob comes up and decides he doesn't want to sell at $2k because he thinks 1 BTC at $2k is cheap. Bob has 10 BTC in his personal wallet. He deposits his 10 BTC on Exchangeus and places an order for $100k per coin. There goes a sell order worth $1M.

But just because Bob wants to sell at $100k per coin does not mean BTC will ever touch that price. Perhaps by the time Bob remembers he placed a sell order, Bitcoin will in fact drop to the floor and be worth $0.01 per coin. Bob's sell order still remains alive though. Although Bitcoin's fully dilluted market cap is now worth $210k, Bob's order is still worth $1M. He's still waiting for it to be fulfilled, yet that does not mean it will ever happen.

You see this happening with a lot of shitcoins. Some people have extraordinary hopes that someone will accidentally sell their shitcoin at astronomical prices. And sometimes.. this really happens!

Let's say you and Alice go over Exchangeus again. You are the only Bitcoin traders there. Suddenly, you start continuously buying & reselling 1 BTC a hundred thousand times between each other. The volume you create is worth 100k BTC, but the reality is.. just a single coin has been moved. Although the volume is that high, it does not mean this many coins have been moved around.

1. Both of them, even with smartphones. Since the seed doesn't leave the device, you can consider it safe even with an infected device. This does not mean you shouldn't make sure the devices you are using aren't infected though. There are lots of things to still be worried about: malware exposing your private info, the old CTRL-C + CTRL-V viruses etc..

2. Yeah, tools like Ian Coleman's could help you out. But this is the more riskier option. You also have the more expensive solution: purchasing another HW and restoring the seed.

3. Not really. It's never happened before and I doubt it ever will since the seed is safely stored in the device. The only risk you might be running is if the device has been physically tampered or stolen. In that case, you should assume that the hacker might have the required equipment to tamper with your device and steal the seed - although even the best companies like Kraken call this a quite far stretch... you should be extremely unlucky to have your device stolen by someone who truly knows how to steal your funds off it!

4. Support will probably not be existent anymore, but there's a very large community that would be able to help you out. And again: Ian Coleman's tool might be the savior of your funds.

5. Not sure what you mean.. Between Ledger and Trezor, I'd prefer Trezor due to it being open-source rather than proprietary.

6. Trezor.

7. I think Trezor is. Since it's open-source, even if your device fails and the company does too, there's an alternative: building your own Trezor from scratch.

Well, it's a matter of multiple factors. For example, coins that are advertised and spoken more about make it more probable for others to invest in them or at least look them up first. But then it depends.. for example, I find some stuff much harder to comprehend for one coin compared to another. For example, ETH's fees are way harder to understand than BTC's. From this point of view, Bitcoin might be under advantage. It all depends on what newbies are looking for, and it seems right now that decentralization and security are a lower priority for them than price and hype is. As long as it's easy to use and has potential or is hyped well enough, it's a green light for them.

I've also looked deeper into the closed-source fears I had before and I found out that you can compile the Ledger software yourself and since they're open-source and you do everything by yourself, you can be assured there is no information is leaked to Ledger's servers. You could use ledgerctl instead of Live if you want full control over pretty much everything.

You could try running this over Tor, but I think even ledgerctl itself is a quite advanced setup. The main issue I used to see is that even if you wanted to use Electrum, in order to use crypto apps with Ledger you had to run it through Live first and I do not like trusting Live with my already-initialized Ledger device. Ledgerctl solves this issue.

Can we say the same thing when the mempool is clogged and only big wallets afford to pay for the fees, or when billionaires clearly have an advantage and can afford purchasing a significant % of the supply? The gap will be even larger the more Bitcoin grows. Billionaires are already in and they're still early!

I'm looking for a fully open-source crypto portfolio tracker but I just can't seem to find any reasonable one. Most trackers out there are on GitHub but have no reputable history behind and since I'm not a coder, best thing I can do is just rely on what other coders say..

I find it weird to give a closed-source software information about how many coins I own, when I purchased them and so on. I feel like this isn't an information to share with a 3rd party.

Do you know any open-source tracker that I can use?

You receive 1 BTC from me. Before you received it, it was considered an unspent output sitting in my wallet. When I'm creating the transaction, the 1 BTC now becomes an "input" I'm sending to your address (the output). And until you spend the coin I gave you, it's known as unspent. After you spend it, it becomes spent.

Now say I gave you another 0.5 BTC. You now own two unspent outputs (1 BTC + 0.5 BTC). If you want to move those together to a paper wallet, when you create the transaction what happens is.. the two unspent outputs become your transaction's inputs and the paper wallet becomes the output.

Bitcoins aren't stored in "intermediate addresses" or anything of that sort. They just move from address to address.

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You go to a BTC ATM and purchase 1 BTC that is sent to your personal wallet's address. Now, you own 1 BTC which is known to the blockchain as an "unspent output".

Now let's say you want to split your Bitcoins into two: you want to fund a paper wallet with 0.25 BTC and keep the rest in your personal wallet as a change. When you do this, you are first of all spending your first unspent output (the 1 BTC) and you're not only doing that but you're also splitting the output into two: the 0.25 BTC paper wallet funding and the 0.75 BTC that you keep as a change.

When initializing the transaction, you have the initial unspent 1 BTC as the input (think of the input as money you want to spend) and two outputs:
 - 0.25 - going to paper wallet
 - 0.75 - the change

So now, the ledger knows the following:
 - The 1 BTC you bought from the ATM is now spent
 - An address now owns 0.25 BTC, which becomes an unspent output
 - Another address now owns 0.75 BTC, which becomes another unspent output.

Edit: I think something's wrong with this explanation so I'd rather strike it, lol.

Mixing pretty much taints the coins more than cleaning them. To exchanges and services, "tainted" means coins that have a suspicious history behind. Cleaning your coins is quite hard, so is making them untraceable. Mixing and coinjoining is usually considered tainting.

Talking about you owning BTC leaks as much information as owning XMR or fiat does. All you're telling is that you own some coins - nobody knows how many and where they are currently sitting.

Many of your answers are thoughts only already-experienced people from crypto have. To most non-coiners, the crypto industry is either a get-rich-quick scheme or a criminal's currency of choice.

Speaking about declaring something illegal and billionaires, you have to understand that big names investing in an industry does not make that industry invincible or the perfect investment. In fact, it's even likely that a billionaire plotted with a government and invested in a certain stock for a specific purpose you may have no idea about.

The only (or one of the very few) reason I don't see a Bitcoin ban coming is because:
 1. Chainalysis was/is a wet dream of control-thirsty governments
 2. Bitcoin cannot effectively be banned considering there are alternatives to accessing the network such as Tor

Until they found out blockchain analysis can be a thing, they were showing a big oppression. Since they found out the Bitcoin network can actually be quite easily analyzed, everything seems to work flawlessly.

Bitcoin can't be stopped anymore. What happens is, instead of them banning BTC, they're turning the world into one of surveillance and full control.

Theoretically, according to the past BTC cycles, an ATH is to be expected. So if we think strictly about the past and expectations, whales may be accumulating for the expected new high.

And it's scary to know that as a whale of BTC, literally everyone in the world could check out how much money you own and where it's going.

I think Greyp Bikes' offering is the closest you can get to what you're looking for. I don't think they'll replace traditional stocks tho.

If you have a garden, create a small DIY steel plate and bury it into the ground. Maybe plant something over it if you want to be sure you'd notice anyone tampering with it.

How safe is this method? All methods have pros and cons. There's no perfect one. Otherwise, everyone would follow it. But I'd personally not go and put my trust into a third party. Instead, I'd just choose the less popular option of storing my seed and try my best not to mess it up.

Another idea might be creating a DIY metal seed capsule, drilling a large enough hole in one of your walls, placing the capsule in it and covering the hole & adding paint over it to make it look as if you've either never touched it or it was just a retouch. These two ideas are some of which I've like never really heard around.

But again, remember there are cons for all methods. And speaking from my own experience, the more paranoid and perfectionist you are, the more suspicious and obvious your hiding spot may be..

If you like someone else caring about your stuff, then you're not in crypto for the sake of cryptocurrencies but strictly for speculation. There's no way someone cannot understand how to use a Ledger Nano S. I don't think the process can be any more straight-forward than that. You literally have all instructions on the internet or in your delivered package.

There are so many things wrong in this statement... banks =/= exchanges

It was advertised as a perfect currency to replace fiat, but it turned into a store of value more than anything. Now with institutional investors pumping billions in it, most people think they're here to stay.. making it even clearer thar it's turning into a long-term safe haven rather than a speculative asset.

This bull run isn't "a big one" if we talk purely about percentages the market has moved this year vs the other 4-year cycles.

I think we need a "crypto winter" at one point. One thing is for sure: this price run cannot last forever. And times like 2014-2015 I believe are very healthy after extraordinary bull runs. But I'm not sure the guy is right.. after all, there's no crystal ball properly and accurately predicting the market's future. What happens in the futute depends completely on the conditions the market will be in at the time..